COLUMBIA JOURNAL OF 

RACE AND LAW FORUM 

VOL. 12 JUNE 2022 NO. 1 

 

 

AN UNINTENDED ABOLITION: 

FAMILY REGULATION DURING THE  

COVID-19 CRISIS 

Anna Arons 

In a typical year, New York City’s vast family regulation 

system, fueled by an army of mandated reporters, 
investigates tens of thousands of reports of child neglect and 

abuse, policing almost exclusively poor Black and Latinx 

families even as the government provides those families 

extremely limited support. When the City shut down in the 
wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, this system shrunk in 

almost every conceivable way as mandated reporters 

retreated, caseworkers adopted less intrusive investigatory 

tactics, and family courts constrained their operations. The 
number of reports fell, the number of cases filed in court fell, 

and the number of children separated from their parents fell.  

At the same time, families found support elsewhere, through 

suddenly burgeoning mutual aid networks and infusions of 
new government entitlements. This large-scale 

reconfiguration of the family regulation system represents a 

short-term experiment in abolition: in this period, New 

Yorkers moved away from a system that oppressed poor 

Black and Latinx people and not only envisioned but built a 

more democratic and humane model to protect families. 

As this Piece demonstrates, under this new model, families 

remained just as safe. Data from the courts and from the 
city’s Administration for Children’s Services reveal that 

there was no rise in child neglect or abuse during the 

shutdown period. Furthermore, once the City began to re-

open, there was no perceivable “rebound effect,” that is, no 
delayed, compensatory rise in reports. This Piece positions 

the COVID-19 shutdown period as a successful case study, 

demonstrating one possible future absent the massive, 

oppressive apparatus of the family regulation system.  

  

 
 Acting Assistant Professor, New York University School of Law. Many thanks to 

the organizers and participants in the Columbia Journal of Race and Law’s 2021 Symposium, 

Strengthened Bonds: Abolishing the Child Welfare System and Re-Envisioning Child Well-

Being. Thank you to the many parents, activists, and practitioners with whom I spoke for 

sharing their thoughtful reflections with me. Finally, thank you to Nina Nevarez for 

excellent research assistance. 



2 COLUM. J. RACE & L. F. [Vol. 12:1 

I. Introduction.......................................................................................... 3 
II. Putting the Family Regulation System on Pause ................................ 5 

A. New Limits on the Family Regulation System ............................. 7 
1. The Closure of Schools .......................................................... 7 
2. Guidance to Child Protective Specialists .............................. 8 
3. Guidance to Contracted Agencies ......................................... 9 
4. Limitations on the Reach of Family Court ......................... 10 

B. Effect of March Directives .......................................................... 13 
1. Decrease in Reports and Investigations ............................. 13 
2. Decrease in Family Separations ......................................... 15 

C. Sustained Safety ......................................................................... 18 
1. Fall in Child Abuse ............................................................. 18 
2. Absence of a Rebound Effect ............................................... 20 

III. Supporting Families Without Regulating Families........................... 21 
A. Mobilization of Mutual Aid ......................................................... 22 
B. Government Support Without Government Control .................. 25 

IV. Conclusion .......................................................................................... 27 
  



2022] AN UNINTENDED ABOLITION 3 

I. INTRODUCTION 

Abolition of the family regulation system is too often dismissed as 

a fantasy, an impracticable ideal that cannot be tested in reality. Yet the 

COVID-19 crisis provided exactly such a test: for several months, in much 

of the country, the family regulation system ceased to function as usual 

and was reduced to its bare bones. New York City, the initial epicenter of 

the crisis, shut down in mid-March 2020 and remained under near-total 

lock-down until mid-June. During that time, mandated reporters and 

agency caseworkers were sidelined and courts limited their operations. The 

number of reports of child neglect and abuse fell, the number of cases filed 

in family court fell, and the number of families separated by the 

government fell. Meanwhile, in the absence of government assistance—and 

government intrusion—communities developed robust mutual aid projects 

to meet their needs for food, provisions, childcare, and therapeutic services. 

As the first wave of the COVID-19 crisis receded in New York City, 

family regulation system operations began to normalize. But while the 

predominant media narrative predicted that the pandemic and 

accompanying social isolation would increase child neglect and abuse, the 

numbers did not bear that out: during New York’s shutdown, child 

fatalities fell, as did reports of child neglect and abuse. Taken in isolation, 

a drop in reporting during an immediate period of crisis might mean little. 

But moving into fall 2020, there was no surge in reports even as mandated 

reporters began to re-enter the field, nor was there any increase in the rate 

at which investigations found reports of neglect or abuse to be valid. The 

drop in reporting did not obscure a “boom” in child neglect and abuse. 

Rather, with fewer government-sanctioned separations of families, 

children stayed just as safe. 

Abolition, writ large, is a decentralized, collectivist project. This 

grounding gives abolitionist movements strength, vitality, and flexibility, 

but can also make the meaning of “abolition” feel opaque or ephemeral.1 

Yet over the last several decades, activists, organizers, and scholars have 

set forth a robust abolitionist philosophy.2 Reviewing this body of 

 
1 Compare Andrew Ferguson, What Does Defund the Police Really Mean?, ATLANTIC 

(June 14, 2020), https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/what-does-defund-police 

-really-mean/612904/ [https://perma.cc/5XXY-AKNP], with Mariame Kaba, Yes, We Mean 

Literally Abolish the Police, N.Y. TIMES (June 12, 2020), https://www.nytimes.com/2020/ 

06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abolish-defund-police.html [https://perma.cc/KD4G-JUWG]. 
2 See, e.g., ABOLITION COLLECTIVE, ABOLISHING CARCERAL SOCIETY 4 (2018); Dan 

Berger, Mariame Kaba & David Stein, What Abolitionists Do, JACOBIN (June 24, 2017), 

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/08/prison-abolition-reform-mass-incarceration 

[https://perma.cc/DS8C-L3MJ]; see generally RUTH WILSON GILMORE, GOLDEN GULAG: 

PRISONS, SURPLUS, CRISIS, AND OPPOSITION IN GLOBALIZING CALIFORNIA (2007); ANGELA Y. 

DAVIS, ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? 15–21 (2003); Who We Are, MOVEMENT FOR BLACK LIVES, 

https://m4bl.org/about-us/#:~:text=The%20Movement%20for%20Black%20Lives,policy%2C 

%20cultural%20and%20political%20wins%2C [https://perma.cc/S56E-4G7S]; Who We Are, 

UPEND MOVEMENT, https://upendmovement.org/about/ [https://perma.cc/9DVD-NR8P]; 

Lisa Sangoi, Co-Founder & Co-Director, Movement for Family Power, Keynote Address at 

upENDing the Child Welfare System: The Road to Abolition Conference (Oct. 29, 2020), 

https://upendmovement.org/2020/10/29/keynote-address-upend-convening/ [https://perma. 

cc/224P-KDS9]; see also Micah Herskind, Prison Abolition Resource Guide, https://micah 

herskind.com/abolition-resource-guide/ [https://perma.cc/8NG3-SBCP] (collecting articles 

and books on abolitionist history, theory and movements). 



4 COLUM. J. RACE & L. F. [Vol. 12:1 

abolitionist philosophy, Professor Dorothy Roberts identified three core 

tenets.3 While Roberts explored these tenets in the context of carceral 

abolition, they are reflected in the abolitionist movements that are working 

to dismantle a wide range of interconnected systems of oppression, from 

the wage system, to environmental exploitation, to the military industrial 

complex, to the family regulation system.4  

First, abolition demands that we acknowledge the history of the 

system in question and grapple with its roots in racial capitalism5—the 

economic structure endemic to this country under which capital 

accumulation and the exploitation of labor are facilitated by racial 

hierarchy and the deep inequalities produced by that hierarchy.6 Second, 

and closely related, abolition requires that we follow that history forward 

to the present to consider how the expansion and maintenance of the 

system “functions to oppress black people and other politically 

marginalized groups in order to maintain a racial capitalist regime.”7 

Finally, Roberts highlights a third tenet, so often forgotten or 

deliberately ignored by those who dismiss abolition. She positions abolition 

as a hopeful and generative project, one that asks that we “imagine and 

build a more humane, free, and democratic society” that no longer relies on 

systematic violence to meet human need and solve social problems.8 

Accordingly, while abolitionists may accept that systems of oppression 

cannot be dismantled overnight, they emphasize chipping away at 

oppressive institutions and shrinking the state’s capacity for violence 

rather than legitimizing or entrenching existing systems.9  

This Piece examines the COVID-19-induced period of temporary 

abolition of the family regulation system in New York City. Part I describes 

the dramatic limitations placed on New York City’s family regulation 

system—a system that targets, almost exclusively, poor Black and Latinx 

 
3 Dorothy E. Roberts, Abolition Constitutionalism, 133 HARV. L. REV. 1, 7 (2019) 

[hereinafter Roberts, Abolition Constitutionalism]. 
4 See Roberts, Abolition Constitutionalism, supra note 3, at 7 (recognizing that “all 

of these oppressive systems and the movements for their eradication are interconnected”); 

Dorothy E. Roberts, How I Became a Family Policing Abolitionist, 11 COLUM. J. RACE & 

L. 455, 457 (2021) [hereinafter Roberts, How I Became a Family Policing Abolitionist]. 
5 See Roberts, Abolition Constitutionalism, supra note 3, at 7. 
6 See Roberts, Abolition Constitutionalism, supra note 3, at 14 n.60 (citing CEDRIC 

J. ROBINSON, BLACK MARXISM: THE MAKING OF THE BLACK RADICAL TRADITION 2 (2000)). 
7 Roberts, Abolition Constitutionalism, supra note 3, at 7–8. 
8 Roberts, Abolition Constitutionalism, supra note 3, at 7–8. 
9 Miriam Mack, The White Supremacy Hydra: How the Family First Prevention 

Services Act Reifies Pathology, Control, and Punishment in the Family Regulation System, 

11 COLUM. J. RACE & L. 767, 807 (2021) [hereinafter Mack, The White Supremacy Hydra] 

(“[T]he family regulation system was neither erected in a day, nor will it be dismantled in a 

day. While progress toward abolition may at times be incremental, abolitionist steps are 

about gaining ground in the constant effort to radically transform society and chipping away 

at oppressive institutions rather than helping them live longer.”) (quoting Critical 

Resistance, Abolitionist Steps, in THE ABOLITIONIST TOOLKIT 48, 48 (2004), http://critical 

resistance.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Ab-Toolkit-Part-6.pdf [https://perma.cc/TGB6-

KUTS]). Abolitionists often frame this practice as pursuing “non-reformist reforms,” as 

opposed to reformist reforms. Id.; see also Roberts, How I Became a Family Policing 

Abolitionist, supra note 4, at 465 (citing Dan Berger, Mariame Kaba & David Stein, What 

Abolitionists Do, JACOBIN (June 24, 2017), https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/08/prison-

abolition-reform-mass-incarceration [https://perma.cc/C55S-5GEL]). 



2022] AN UNINTENDED ABOLITION 5 

families—during the COVID-19 shutdown. This Part concludes, based on 

data from New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services (“ACS”) 

and family courts, that the shrinking of the family regulation system had 

no adverse effect on the safety of children. Part II then describes the 

mutual aid groups that grew as the family regulation system shrank. 

Together with increased government cash aid, these mutual aid groups’ 

work met families’ vital needs through a model of collective action and self-

determination, rather than policing and state violence.  

Though unintentional, this brief experiment shows that the 

outsized and reactionary family regulation system that New York built up 

prior to the pandemic is not necessary to protect children. That system 

purported to address the problem of child maltreatment, but “child 

maltreatment” often means nothing more than child poverty.10 Thus, it 

should not be surprising that the system’s draconian tools of surveillance 

and separation were ill-fit to that problem. Indeed, the data from the 

shutdown period makes this clear: with less surveillance and fewer 

separations, children stayed just as safe, demonstrating that in “normal” 

times, we needlessly separate children from their families even when 

children would have been as safe at home. Instead of reverting to an 

oppressive system of family policing, we can address child poverty by 

insisting on a radically reduced and re-envisioned system that relies on 

principles of mutual aid rather than government-led oppression. Abolition 

need not be a fantasy; New York City already made it, for a moment, a 

reality. 

II. PUTTING THE FAMILY REGULATION SYSTEM ON 

PAUSE 

Through early 2020, New York City operated a vast family 

regulation system, surveilling and policing thousands of families annually. 

This system did not focus evenly on all of New York’s families; rather, it 

focused on poor Black and Latinx families almost exclusively.  

Over the last five years, one in five New York City children—but 

one in three Black and Latinx children—had contact with the system.11 At 

every stage of the family regulation system, Black and Latinx children are 

overrepresented: while only sixty percent of the city’s children are Black or 

Latinx, ninety percent of children named in investigations, ninety percent 

of children placed in foster care, and ninety percent of children in open 

preventive service cases are Black or Latinx.12 While poverty drives reports 

of neglect generally, the system especially targets poor Black and Latinx 

families. Neighborhoods with the highest rates of child poverty had rates 

of investigation four times higher than neighborhoods with the lowest rates 

of child poverty, but even among neighborhoods with similar poverty rates, 

 
10 See infra Part II. 
11 Lisa Sangoi, “Whatever They Do, I’m Her Comfort, I’m Her Protector.” How the 

Foster System Has Become Ground Zero for the U.S. Drug War, MOVEMENT FOR FAM. POWER, 

https://drugpolicy.org/resource/MFPreport [https://perma.cc/ZJK5-LR2C].  
12 Hearing Before the Comm. on the General Welfare, N.Y. City Council 9 (Oct. 31, 

2019) (written testimony of David Hansell, Comm’r of the Admin. for Child. Servs.), 

https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/View.ashx?M=F&ID=7848724&GUID=1FCB59BF-3609-

4090-8ADC-17FA992BB742 [https://perma.cc/ZAY5-YS86]; see also infra Part II.A.3, 

(describing preventive service model). 



6 COLUM. J. RACE & L. F. [Vol. 12:1 

those with higher concentrations of Black and Latinx residents had higher 

rates of investigation.13 

This disproportionality is neither a coincidence nor a recent 

phenomenon. The project of policing poor Black and Native families and 

immigrant families is older than the country itself. Black enslaved families 

were forcibly separated, in a pattern of state-sanctioned violence that tore 

apart families and pathologized and punished Black parents.14 The 

government enacted the same sort of violence on Native families, removing 

Native children from their families to forcefully assimilate them.15 In 

urban areas, white middle class reformers, aided explicitly and implicitly 

by the state, cast poor immigrant mothers as “degraded, immoral, and 

sexually promiscuous,” and sought to take their children, too.16 Even as the 

language of family regulation became more refined and its tactics more 

subtle, its underlying purpose of controlling and pathologizing 

marginalized families persisted. Indeed, it was only when Black children 

began receiving welfare benefits in large numbers that family regulation 

agencies “pivoted sharply from providing services to children in their 

homes to taking children from their parents,” a pivot that marked the birth 

of the modern family regulation system.17 

The very meaning of “child maltreatment” contributes to the 

overrepresentation of poor children in the family regulation system. In 

New York, fewer than fifteen percent of reports received allege physical or 

sexual abuse, whereas sixty-five percent allege “neglect,” a category 

capturing everything from malnutrition to inadequate clothing or shelter, 

to lack of appropriate supervision.18 Not only may conditions of poverty— 

a lack of material resources and a lack of access to childcare, healthcare, 

mental health services, and substance use treatment—be conflated with 

child neglect, but residential segregation along racial and class lines, 

together with poorer families’ increased reliance on government services, 

 
13 Angela Butel, Data Brief: Child Welfare Investigations and New York City 

Neighborhoods, THE NEW SCH. CTR. FOR N.Y.C. AFFS. (2019), http://www.centernyc.org/ 

data-brief-child-welfare-investigations [https://perma.cc/93UN-DY9R] (comparing 

investigations among New York City’s 59 community districts).  
14 DOROTHY E. ROBERTS, SHATTERED BONDS 233–236, 248–250 (2003) [hereinafter 

ROBERTS, SHATTERED BONDS]; see also Miriam Mack, The White Supremacy Hydra, supra 

note 9 at 781 (citing Peggy C. Davis & Richard G. Dudley, Jr., The Black Family in Modern 

Slavery, 4 HARV. BLACKLETTER J. 9 (1987)).  
15 Theresa Rocha Beardall & Frank Edwards, Abolition, Settler Colonialism, and 

the Persistent Threat of Indian Child Welfare, 11 COLUM. J. RACE & L. 533, 538 (2021). 
16 Amy Mulzer & Tara Urs, However Kindly Intentioned: Structural Racism and 

Volunteer CASA Programs, 20 CUNY L. REV. 23, 55, 57 (2016) (describing the role of 

reformers in the regulation of immigrant families and noting that reformers served as 

“virtually a judge’s private advisor” and “judges usually accepted the [private] agency’s 

advice”). 
17 Roberts, How I Became A Family Policing Abolitionist, supra note 4, at 464. 
18 Compare N.Y.C. ADMIN. FOR CHILD. SERVS., FLASH MONTHLY INDICATOR 

REPORT: JULY 2020, at 29 (2020), https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/acs/pdf/data-analysis/flash 

Reports/2020/07.pdf [https://perma.cc/M4GV-LS3H] [hereinafter JULY 2020 FLASH REPORT], 

with N.Y.C. ADMIN. FOR CHILD. SERVS., FLASH MONTHLY INDICATOR REPORT: JULY 2019, at 

27 (2019) [hereinafter JULY 2019 FLASH REPORT]. 



2022] AN UNINTENDED ABOLITION 7 

places marginalized families under heavier surveillance by mandated 

reporters.19 

The family regulation system, then, has long played a key role in 

maintaining racial and class hierarchies by policing poor Black, Native, 

and immigrant families.20 This project has long been entrenched in New 

York, as the government, aided by an army of mandated reporters, 

investigated and punished poor Black and Latinx families for conditions of 

poverty, coerced families into ongoing services, and broke apart families. 

In March 2020, this machinery met an obstacle it could not churn 

through: the emergence of COVID-19 in New York City. As city and state 

officials ordered shutdowns and limited every aspect of New Yorkers’ lives, 

the family regulation system shrunk too: schools closed for in-person 

learning, caseworkers limited home visits, and family courts restricted the 

kinds of cases they would hear. This Part describes these key changes to 

the operations of the family regulation system during the “COVID-19 

Pause” and the effect of those changes on the families and communities 

usually surveilled by ACS. 

A. New Limits on the Family Regulation System 

1. The Closure of Schools 

On March 11, 2020, Mayor Bill De Blasio told New Yorkers, “If 

you’re not sick, you should be going about your life.”21 Just four days later, 

on March 15, 2020, he announced the closure of New York City’s public 

schools.22 This closure, affecting 1.1 million schoolchildren, signaled a new 

phase in the city’s COVID-19 response, presaging the broader New York 

State on Pause executive order that closed all non-essential businesses and 

banned all non-essential gatherings a week later.23  

For the family regulation system, the closure of public schools 

meant the loss of its primary source of surveillance. In the period leading 

up to the Pause, school personnel were responsible for more than a quarter 

of all calls to the State Central Register (“SCR”), New York’s child 

protection hotline.24 This was not unique to New York: nationwide, 

education personnel make more child maltreatment allegations than any 

 
19 See generally MARTIN GUGGENHEIM, WHAT’S WRONG WITH CHILDREN’S RIGHTS 

192–193 (2005) (citing DUNCAN LINDSEY, THE WELFARE OF CHILDREN 65–66 (1994)) 

(describing poverty as the number one predictor of reports of neglect); TINA LEE, CATCHING 

A CASE: INEQUALITY AND FEAR IN NEW YORK CITY’S CHILD WELFARE SYSTEM (2016) 

(describing family regulation system as a punitive system that punishes parents for poverty 

and removes children from their parents’ care, rather than providing parents the necessary 

financial support).  
20 See generally ROBERTS, SHATTERED BONDS, supra note 14. 
21 Serena Dai, Mayor Says That Healthy People Should Still Be Dining Out, EATER 

(Mar. 11, 2020), https://ny.eater.com/2020/3/11/21175497/coronavirus-nyc-restaurants-safe-

dine-out [https://perma.cc/AM93-RAV3]. 
22 Eliza Shapiro, New York Schools to Close to Slow the Spread of Coronavirus, N.Y. 

TIMES (Mar. 15, 2020), https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/15/nyregion/nyc-schools-closed. 

html [https://perma.cc/HUL5-UT7V]. 
23 New York State on Pause: 10 Point Plan, N.Y. STATE (Mar. 22, 2020), https://web. 

archive.org/web/20200401234802/https://coronavirus.health.ny.gov/new-york-state-pause.  
24 N.Y.C. ADMIN. FOR CHILD. SERVS., FLASH MONTHLY INDICATOR REPORT: MARCH 

2020, at 28 (2020), https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/acs/pdf/data-analysis/flashReports/2020/ 

03.pdf [https://perma.cc/3DM6-QCHV] [hereinafter MAR. 2020 FLASH REPORT]. 



8 COLUM. J. RACE & L. F. [Vol. 12:1 

other group, though decades of data show that these same reports are the 

least likely to be substantiated by an investigation.25 Decades of research 

show, too, that reporters are more likely to suspect and report neglect or 

abuse of poor Black and Latinx children than of white higher-income 

children.26 Often, rather than ensuring the safety of students, educators’ 

reporting habits create distrust between parents and schools, and 

contribute to the regulation and penalization of the city’s Black and Latinx 

families.27 By moving schools to remote operations, the city began to close 

this spigot. 

2. Guidance to Child Protective Specialists 

Just as surveillance of children at school decreased, so, too, did 

surveillance of families in their homes. On March 15, 2020, the State Office 

of Children and Family Services (“OCFS”) issued a guidance to family 

regulation workers regarding safety measures for investigations (the 

“Investigation Guidance”).28 It encouraged caseworkers, “when 

appropriate, to remotely assess the safety and risk posed to a child,” and to 

conduct a health screening of families before arriving at their homes.29  

This marked a stark departure from usual investigatory protocol. 

ACS typically commences its investigations by going to a family’s home 

unannounced for an initial visit where workers enter every room, open 

cabinets and refrigerators, question parents and children separately, and 

demand to perform “body checks” examining children’s near-nude bodies.30 

These intrusive investigations can spiral quickly, especially because 

 
25 DANA WEINER ET AL., CHAPIN HALL AT THE UNIV. OF CHICAGO, COVID-19 AND 

CHILD WELFARE: USING DATA TO UNDERSTAND TRENDS IN MALTREATMENT AND RESPONSE 

2 (2020), https://www.chapinhall.org/wp-content/uploads/Covid-and-Child-Welfare-brief.pdf 

[https://perma.cc/TW5N-Q4GR]; Brianna Harvey, Josh Gupta-Kagan & Christopher Church, 

Reimagining Schools’ Role Outside the Family Regulation System, 11 COLUM. J. RACE & LAW 

575, 585 (2021) (describing schools as largest source of reports and noting that “[a]t every 

stage of the process, allegations from schools are less likely to protect children” than reports 

from other sources). 
26 Jessica Dixon Weaver, The African-American Child Welfare Act: A Legal Redress 

for African-American Disproportionality in Child Protection Cases, 10 BERKELEY J. AFR.-AM 

L. & POL’Y 109, 117 (2008); Jina Lee et al., Implicit Bias in the Child Welfare, Education, 

and Mental Health Systems, NAT’L CTR. FOR YOUTH LAW 3 (2015), https://youthlaw.org/wp-

content/uploads/2015/07/Implicit-Bias-in-Child-Welfare-Education-and-Mental-Health-

Systems-Literature-Review_061915.pdf [https://perma.cc/6CQ7-K8SR]. 
27 Rebecca Klein & Caroline Preston, When Schools Use Child Protective Services 

as a Weapon Against Parents, HECHINGER REP. (Nov. 17, 2018), https://hechingerreport.org 

/when-schools-use-child-protective-services-as-a-weapon-against-parents/ [https://perma.cc 

/LPA3-KYLX]; see also Harvey, Gupta-Kagan & Church, supra note 25, at 14. 
28 Lisa Ghartey, Deputy Comm’r, N.Y. Off. of Child. & Fam. Servs. Div. of Child 

Welfare & Cmty. Servs., Novel Coronavirus of 2019 Disease (COVID-19) Guidance for 

Children Protective Services Staff (Mar. 15, 2020) [hereinafter OCFS Investigation Guidance 

for CPS Staff], https://ocfs.ny.gov/main/news/2020/COVID-2020Mar15-Guidance-for-

CPS.pdf [https://perma.cc/K4C9-36QC]. 
29 OCFS Guidance for CPS Staff, supra note 28. 
30 A Parent’s Guide to a Child Abuse Investigation, N.Y.C. ADMIN. FOR CHILD. 

SERVS., https://www1.nyc.gov/site/acs/child-welfare/parents-guide-child-abuse-investigation 

.page [https://perma.cc/VT3Q-LA7E]; THE CHILD WELFARE ORGANIZING PROJECT ET AL., 

THE SURVIVAL GUIDE TO THE NYC CHILD WELFARE SYSTEM: A WORKBOOK FOR PARENTS BY 

PARENTS 24 (2007), http://www.brooklynacslawyer.com/acssurvivalguide.pdf [https://perma. 

cc/HGH8-MLBY]; Michelle Burrell, What Can the Child Welfare System Learn in the Wake 

of the Floyd Decision?: A Comparison of Stop-And-Frisk Policing and Child Welfare 

Investigations, 22 CUNY L. REV. 124, 131 (2019). 



2022] AN UNINTENDED ABOLITION 9 

parents are rarely, if ever, informed that they have a right to counsel, and 

instead are encouraged to be “forthcoming,” without receiving warning that 

their statements may be used against them.31 Thus, an investigation into 

a child’s lateness to school might, once a worker enters a home and 

interviews a parent, become an investigation into the family’s “dirty home” 

or into the parent’s marijuana use, if revealed to a worker who presented 

themself as a helper. The Investigation Guidance limited the sprawling 

and invasive nature of investigations, requiring that families receive 

advance notice and encouraging ACS workers to stay out of families’ homes 

if possible. 

3. Guidance to Contracted Agencies 

Beyond the surveillance typically carried out by its own employees, 

ACS contracts with private agencies, which place and monitor children in 

foster homes and administer “preventive services.”32 As part of an 

investigation, ACS may refer a family to in-home preventive services— 

which might include ongoing home visits from a caseworker, accompanied 

by referrals for services like therapy or substance use treatment—and to 

limited material provisions, like diapers, furniture, and clothing for 

children.33 ACS touts preventive services as voluntary.34 But families often 

feel that they have no real choice; if parents do not accept the referral, ACS 

may file a case against them and even try to remove their children from 

their care.35  

Preventive in-home services are cast as a more progressive 

alternative to foster care, allowing families to stay safely together while 

providing them needed assistance.36 But preventive services are not a 

panacea, nor should they be treated as a gentler version of family 

regulation. They are unequally offered, with Black families least likely to 

 
31 Burrell, supra note 30, at 144–145; Eileen Grench, City, Union Push Back on 

Informing Parents of Rights in Child-Welfare Probes, THE CITY (Oct. 19, 2021), https://www. 

thecity.nyc/2021/10/19/22735575/nyc-child-welfare-probes-parents-not-told-their-rights 

[https://perma.cc/GV2G-7KEW]. 
32 About ACS, N.Y.C. ADMIN. FOR CHILD. SERVS., https://www1.nyc.gov/site/acs/ 

about/about.page [https://perma.cc/57TJ-L9ZZ]. 
33 A Parent’s Guide to a Child Abuse Investigation, supra note 30; Prevention 

Services, N.Y.C. ADMIN. FOR CHILD. SERVS., https://www1.nyc.gov/site/acs/child-welfare/ 

prevention-services.page [https://perma.cc/KF4C-YAG2]. 
34 A Parent’s Guide to a Child Abuse Investigation, supra note 30. 
35 See, e.g., Kathryn Joyce, The Crime of Parenting While Poor, NEW REPUBLIC (Feb. 

25, 2019), https://newrepublic.com/article/153062/crime-parenting-poor-new-york-city-child-

welfare-agency-reform [https://perma.cc/9YLQ-264J] (quoting a social worker who describes 

preventive service model as, “supposedly voluntary, but there’s a lot of undertone that, ‘If 

you don’t, we’ll be watching’”); see also Soledad A. McGrath, Differential Response in Child 

Protection Services: Perpetuating the Illusion of Voluntariness, 42 U. MEM. L. REV. 629, 671 

(2012). 
36 See, e.g., Jim Purcell, Opinion, Prevention Services Can Help NYC Avoid a Feared 

Foster-Care Surge, CITY LIMITS (June 10, 2020), https://citylimits.org/2020/06/10/opinion-

prevention-services-can-help-nyc-avoid-a-feared-foster-care-surge/ [https://perma.cc/6ZXV-

5R74]; Fernando Clara et al., Nat’l Implementation Rsch. Network & Casey Fam. Programs, 

Implementing Evidence-Based Child Welfare: The New York City Experience, CASEY FAM. 

PROGRAMS 10 (2017), https://caseyfamilypro-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/media/evidence-

based-child-welfare-nyc.pdf [https://perma.cc/XLQ9-R5V6]. 



10 COLUM. J. RACE & L. F. [Vol. 12:1 

receive a referral.37 If they are offered at all, they serve as another means 

of surveillance, as preventive service caseworkers, who are mandated 

reporters, must see families approximately twice each month.38 The threat 

of a new report hangs heavy, diminishing trust between families and 

caseworkers, and leading to family separations for concerns that likely 

never would have risen to the level of an SCR report.39  

In spite of families’ reservations, ACS’s preventive program has 

ballooned over the last two decades. As of March 2020, there were 21,200 

children and 9,100 families enrolled in preventive services.40 But on March 

20, 2020, OCFS issued a guidance (the “Preventive Guidance”) urging the 

private agencies with which it contracts to reduce in-person contact.41 It 

encouraged preventive agencies to carry out “casework contacts” remotely 

when possible and to pre-screen families for COVID-19 before any home 

visits.42 Thus, OCFS reduced the surveillance of families engaged in 

“voluntary” services just as it reduced the surveillance of families by ACS 

staff during investigations. 

4. Limitations on the Reach of Family Court 

The family regulation system’s surveillance and investigation 

apparatus feeds into the city’s family court system. In order to obtain final 

orders removing children from their parents’ care or requiring that parents 

participate in certain services, the government must file a petition in court 

and ultimately prove that a child was abused or neglected. The 

Constitution demands as much, as the integrity of the family unit is 

protected under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, 

and the government may only impinge upon it after proving a parent’s 

 
37 CHILD. BUREAU, DEP’T OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVS., CHILDREN OF COLOR IN 

THE CHILD WELFARE SYSTEM: PERSPECTIVES FROM THE CHILD WELFARE COMMUNITY 7 

(2003), https://www.childwelfare.gov/pubPDFs/children.pdf [https://perma.cc/H632-VWRL].  
38 N.Y. OFF. OF CHILD. & FAM. SERVS., PREVENTIVE SERVICES PRACTICE GUIDANCE 

MANUAL ch. 4, at 4-7 (2015), https://ocfs.ny.gov/main/publications/Preventive%20Services 

%20Guide%202015.pdf [https://perma.cc/GHR6-XKK2] [hereinafter OCFS PREVENTIVE 

SERVICES GUIDANCE MANUAL] (“Caseworkers are mandated reporters under state law, and 

may be prosecuted or fined if they fail to report.”); id. app. C-1 (requiring minimum of twelve 

casework contacts every six months). 
39 OCFS PREVENTIVE SERVICES GUIDANCE MANUAL, supra note 38, ch. 6, at 6-6 

(instructing caseworkers to pay special attention to matters like the family’s “hygiene and 

cleanliness” and the family’s level of enthusiasm for preventive services); see also Joyce, 

supra note 35 (“ACS’s successes have been tempered by the fact that, because many poor 

parents view ACS as inherently dangerous, they routinely walk away from the programs 

that are designed to support them, rather than invite child welfare into their lives.”); 

Interview with Attorney A, Parent Defense Attorney, N.Y.C. Public Defender Office (July 15, 

2020) (on file with author) [hereinafter Interview with Parent Att’y A] (recounting case in 

which caseworker reported a family because a young child had a “patch of dirt” on her skin, 

there was “very little food” in the home, and the mother regularly contacted the preventive 

service agency requesting assistance buying food), 
40 N.Y.C. ADMIN. FOR CHILD. SERVS., QUARTERLY REPORT ON PREVENTION 

SERVICES UTILIZATION, JANUARY–MARCH 2020 (2020), https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/acs/pdf/ 

data-analysis/2020/ll11preventionservicesq12020.pdf [https://perma.cc/22VK-E9S9]. 
41 Lisa Ghartey Ogundimu, Deputy Commir’s, N.Y. Off. of Child. & Fam. Servs. Div. 

of Child Welfare & Cmty. Servs., Novel Coronavirus of 2019 Disease (COVID-19) Guidance 

for Foster Care and Preventive Staff (Mar. 20, 2020), https://ocfs.ny.gov/main/news/ 

2020/COVID-2020Mar20-Guidance-for-Foster-Care-and-Preventive-Staff.pdf 

[https://perma.cc/N9CU-F793] [hereinafter OCFS Guidance for Preventive Staff].  
42 OCFS Guidance for Preventive Staff, supra note 41, at 3–4. 



2022] AN UNINTENDED ABOLITION 11 

unfitness.43 In theory, then, parents’ participation in services and 

cooperation with agency supervision prior to the entry of a finding of 

neglect or abuse is strictly voluntary. But in reality, parents often have no 

choice but to accede to “service plans” before a finding is made against 

them, as ACS may ask a judge to condition a child’s release home to their 

parents on the parents’ “cooperation” with services and ongoing home 

supervision.44 If a parent does not agree to these orders, ACS may instead 

seek orders removing a child from their home.45  

On March 23, 2020, Hon. Jeanette Ruiz, the Administrative Judge 

of the New York City Family Court, issued the New York City Family Court 

Coronavirus Plan, effective March 26, 2020 (the “Court Plan”).46 Under 

that directive, the family courts in the city’s five boroughs shifted to virtual 

operations and limited the types of cases they would hear.47 On existing 

cases, all non-emergency matters—including trials, status conferences, 

and pending visitation applications—were adjourned.48 As for new cases, 

courts accepted only those involving applications for remands,49 the telling 

term carried over from the carceral state to refer to the city’s applications 

to remove children from their parents’ care. 

For those families already deeply embroiled in the family 

regulation system, this order had tragic and traumatic consequences. 

Parents awaiting trial were left in legal limbo and parents seeking to 

expand their visitation with their children in foster care had to prevail 

upon the discretion of ACS and foster care agencies, without the ability to 

challenge those agencies’ decisions in court.50 Beyond this immediate 

 
43 Stanley v. Illinois, 405 U.S. 645 (1972) (holding that the Due Process Clause 

constitutionally requires the state to accord parents with a hearing on their fitness and to 

provide unfitness in fact, before separating children); see also N.Y. FAM. CT. ACT §§ 1011; 

1012; 1027. 
44 See Amy Sinden, “Why Won’t Mom Cooperate?”: A Critique of Informality in Child 

Welfare Proceedings, 11 YALE J. L. & FEMINISM 339, 354–55 (1999) [hereinafter Sinden, “Why 

Won’t Mom Cooperate?”] (situating the pressure on mothers to “cooperate” within the “social 

work discourse” that is often used to frame the family regulation system); see also N.Y. FAM. 

CT. ACT § 1015-a (empowering family courts to order services); id. §§ 1027, 1028 (directing 

family court judges to consider whether the provision of services to a child or child’s family 

could prevent or eliminate the need to remove the child from the home). 
45 See Sinden, Why Won’t Mom Cooperate?”, supra note 44, at 345–50 (describing 

various situations involving children being removed from their homes).  
46 Hon. Jeanette Ruiz, Administrative Judge, N.Y.C. Fam. Ct., Updated Family 

Court Coronavirus Plan (Mar. 23, 2020) [hereinafter Mar. 23, 2020 Family Court 

Coronavirus Plan]. 
47 Id. at 2. 
48 Id. at 1. Courts continued to hear emergency orders to show cause in these cases; 

these “emergencies” typically involved requests to change the placement of a child. Interview 

with Attorney B, Parent Defense Attorney, N.Y.C. Public Defender Office (May 4, 2020) (on 

file with author) [hereinafter Interview with Parent Att’y B]; Interview with Attorney C, 

Parent Defense Attorney, N.Y.C. Public Defender Office (May 27, 2020) (on file with author) 

[hereinafter Interview with Parent Att’y C]. 
49 Mar. 23, 2020 Family Court Coronavirus Plan, supra note 46., at 1  
50 Ese Olumhense, Parents Seeking Return of Children Must Forge Connections on 

Screens, THE CITY (May 21, 2020), https://www.thecity.nyc/government/2020/5/21/21270820/ 

parents-seeking-return-of-children-first-must-forge-connections-on-screens [https://perma. 

cc/8VL6-VYKK]. 



12 COLUM. J. RACE & L. F. [Vol. 12:1 

trauma, the Pause imperiled parents’ ability to meet statutory timelines to 

maintain their parental rights to their children.51 

But for hundreds of other parents, the Court Plan effectively 

prevented ACS from hauling them into court at all, as it limited ACS’s 

ability to file new cases to only those that sought to separate children from 

their parents.52 In 2019, sixty-six percent of the 12,300 children named in 

proceedings in the city’s family courts were released under court-ordered 

supervision on the date of filing.53 While some court-ordered supervision 

cases resulted from judges’ denials of ACS’s applications to separate 

families, far more reflected ACS’s own initial applications for court-ordered 

supervision54—applications that at times reflected concerns for children’s 

safety but at times arose instead out of frustration with parents’ lack of 

“cooperation.”55 

Under the March 23, 2020 directive, no matter how frustrated a 

caseworker might be, ACS could not bring parents to court unless it was 

prepared to show that their children would be at imminent risk of physical 

or emotional harm if the children stayed home. As discussed in Part I.B, 

with this heightened barrier to filing, the number of families brought to 

court dropped precipitously, and so too did the court-ordered separation 

and surveillance of families. 

 
51 See, e.g., Julia Lurie, “Mommy, How Come I Only See You on the Phone?”, 

MOTHER JONES (Mar. 22, 2021), motherjones.com/crime-justice/2021/03/mommy-how-come-

i-only-see-you-on-the-phone/ [https://perma.cc/G879-ULAZ] (describing families’ prolonged 

separations and limited visits, as well as concerns from officials at the Children’s Bureau of 

the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that the clock toward termination of 

parental rights has “kept ticking in some places”)  
52 Mar. 23, 2020 Family Court Coronavirus Plan, supra note 46, at 1. 
53 N.Y.C. ADMIN. FOR CHILD. SERVS., FLASH MONTHLY INDICATOR REPORT: 

JANUARY 2020, at 9 (2020), https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/acs/pdf/data-analysis/flashReports/ 

2020/01.pdf [https://perma.cc/FP3D-KWMS]. 
54 Because ACS does not release data reflecting how often parents challenged their 

children’s removal, it is difficult to discern the number of cases in which ACS initially sought 

court-ordered supervision, as opposed to the number of cases where ACS initially sought, 

and was denied, an order for a child’s removal, thus converting the case into a court-ordered 

supervision case. N.Y.C Admin. for Child. Servs., Response to Author’s Freedom of 

Information Law Request (Aug. 6, 2020) (on file with author) (request made under the 

Freedom of Information Law, N.Y.PUB. OFF. LAW § 84 et seq.). However, in those cases where 

ACS conducted emergency removals, then filed for approval in court ex post facto, twenty to 

twenty-five percent of children were immediately returned home by judges, thus converting 

those cases into court-ordered supervision cases. Michael Fitzgerald, New York City Council 

Confronts Child Welfare Agency Over Parent-Child Separations, IMPRINT (Nov. 29, 2018), 

https://imprintnews.org/news-2/new-york-city-levin-lancman-hansell/32921 

[https://perma.cc/KY4V-RP4Y]. Emergency removals should reflect the direst of 

circumstances—those cases where ACS assessed a child to be in such immediate danger that 

ACS could not seek a court order prior to removal—and thus should reflect, among the cases 

ACS files in court, the strongest cases for removal. We may assume conservatively, then, 

that judges approve ex ante in-court applications for removal at the same rate they approve 

ex post applications to approve an out-of-court emergency removal: that is, in seventy-five to 

eighty percent of cases. Under that assumption, in 2019, ACS sought court-ordered 

supervision in about sixty percent of cases. 
55 See Burrell, supra note 30, at 144 (“In many cases, the caseworker may mark the 

case as indicated but not pursue formal charges in court if the parents are cooperative with 

services.”); see also Sinden, “Why Won’t Mom Cooperate?”, supra note 44, at 345.  



2022] AN UNINTENDED ABOLITION 13 

B. Effect of March Directives 

The combined effect of these directives—school closures, decreased 

in-home surveillance, and limits on court operations—was immediate and 

dramatic. The numbers of reports, investigations, and new family court 

petitions plummeted. At the same time, on the cases they did hear, family 

court judges evinced an increased reluctance to separate families amid an 

unprecedented crisis. Though media outlets predicted increases in child 

abuse, with children “trapped” at home with parents under increased 

stress and away from the watchful eyes of mandated reporters, ACS’s own 

data show that there was a drop in child abuse in the initial COVID-19 

shutdown and that rates of child neglect, at worst, remained unchanged. 

1. Decrease in Reports and Investigations 

Comparing the three full months following the implementation of 

the shutdown directives with the same period the prior year, the number 

of reports to the State Central Register regarding children in New York 

City fell by more than 40%, to 9,848 from 17,347.56  

Reports from families and community members fell by 21% but 

reports from mandated reporters plummeted by 53%.57 Before the 

shutdown, mandated reporters made two-thirds of all reports but that rate 

fell to just 55%.58 As might be expected given the parameters of the 

shutdown, this drop-off was not distributed evenly among mandated 

reporter groups. While reports by school personnel fell by 83%, reports by 

medical providers and social service personnel dropped by around 40%, and 

reports by law enforcement fell by only 33%.59 It should not be surprising 

that non-educators continued to make reports at relatively high rates; even 

with schools closed, poor families could not escape all surveillance, as they 

continued to live in heavily policed neighborhoods and to rely on social 

service programs that also monitor families.60  

Despite a spate of articles arguing that parents, under increased 

financial and emotional stress, might abuse their children at higher 

rates,61 the content of the reports received did not vary from the year prior. 

 
56 JULY 2020 FLASH REPORT, supra note 18; N.Y.C. ADMIN. FOR CHILD. SERVS., 

FLASH MONTHLY INDICATOR REPORT: JUNE 2020, at 3 (2020), https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/ 

acs/pdf/data-analysis/flashReports/2020/06.pdf [https://perma.cc/FE24-NCXP]; N.Y.C. 

ADMIN. FOR CHILD. SERVS., FLASH MONTHLY INDICATOR REPORT: MAY 2020, at 3 (2020), 

https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/acs/pdf/data-analysis/flashReports/2020/05.pdf 

[https://perma.cc/CE2U-DNDR]. These figures refer to reports received by the State Central 

Register and include reports that were screened out, i.e. reports that did not trigger an 

investigation. Id. 
57 JULY 2020 FLASH REPORT, supra note 18, at 28. 
58 Id. 
59 Id. 
60 Mulzer & Urs, supra note 16, at 28 Nor did teachers curb all of their reporting. 

As children moved to remote schooling, some teachers began to report children for failing to 

log on for class. See Eileen Grench, Parents Expecting iPad Deliveries Got Knock on Door 

From Child Welfare Workers, THE CITY (Apr. 22, 2020), https://www.thecity.nyc/ 

education/2020/4/28/21247059/parents-expecting-ipad-deliveries-got-knock-on-door-from-

child-welfare-workers [https://perma.cc/8TEF-B5NC]. 
61 See, e.g., Nina Agrawal, The Coronavirus Could Cause a Child Abuse Epidemic, 

N.Y. TIMES (Apr. 7, 2020), https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/opinion/coronavirus-child-

abuse.html [https://perma.cc/8FWM-HU8H]; Angela Uhfeil, Calls to Colorado’s Child Abuse 



14 COLUM. J. RACE & L. F. [Vol. 12:1 

In spring 2020, in the three months following the shutdown, only 13% of 

reports concerned physical, sexual, or psychological abuse, a dip from 15% 

in the same period in 2019. Meanwhile, reports coded as neglect, together 

with reports regarding maltreatment concerns such as parental substance 

use, school absences, and lack of medical attention, made up approximately 

85% of reports in both years.62 

Likewise, the shutdown did not change the rate at which reports 

were substantiated. In New York, a report is considered “substantiated” if, 

after investigation, ACS determines that it is supported by “some credible 

evidence.”63 This is a low burden, satisfied by any “evidence that is worthy 

and capable of being believed.”64 Illustrating the prevalence of 

overreporting, less than 40% of investigations uncovered evidence that met 

even this low standard: among reports that resulted in investigations, in 

spring 2019, the rate of substantiation hovered between 35% and 38%.65 As 

the number of investigations shrunk, this rate remained steady, staying 

between 37% and 39% in spring 2020.66 This steady rate of substantiation 

is particularly noteworthy precisely because it came at a time when fewer 

reports were received. Past studies have shown that when family 

regulation agencies receive fewer reports, their investigations for each 

report tend to be more thorough and more accurate, as workers are less 

bogged down with frivolous reports.67 If anything, then, the rate of 

substantiation would be expected to rise as the number of reports dropped. 

Instead, it remained unchanged. 

The decrease in reports and investigations brought with it a 

decrease in in-home preventive services. Compared with the same period 

in 2019, the number of referrals to preventive services fell by 27% and the 

number of new cases opened fell even more dramatically, by 45%.68 Of all 

of the services administered by ACS, preventive services—which can 

provide childcare vouchers, access to food pantries, and clothing and 

diapers for children—might seem the most likely to swell during a 

recession. But preventive services are tightly linked to ACS’s policing arm. 

In spring 2019, 80% of referrals to these so-called voluntary services 

 
Hotline Have Dropped—And That’s Not a Good Thing, 5280 MAG. (May 18, 2020), 

https://www.5280.com/2020/05/calls-to-colorados-child-abuse-hotline-have-dropped-and-

thats-not-a-good-thing/ [https://perma.cc/A29X-Z953]. 
62 Compare JULY 2020 FLASH REPORT, supra note 18, at 29, with JULY 2019 FLASH 

REPORT, supra note 18, at 27.  
63 N.Y. SOC. SERV. LAW § 412(7). Effective January 1, 2022, this standard will be 

raised to a “fair preponderance of the evidence.” Id. 
64 N.Y. COMP. CODES R. & REGS. tit. 18, § 432.1(g). 
65 N.Y.C. ADMIN. FOR CHILD. SERVS., FLASH MONTHLY INDICATOR REPORT: 

SEPTEMBER 2020, at 6 (2020), https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/acs/pdf/data-analysis/ 

flashReports/2020/09.pdf [https://perma.cc/U8JV-C6HE] (comparing June 2019 and June 

2020); N.Y.C. ADMIN. FOR CHILD. SERVS., FLASH MONTHLY INDICATOR REPORT: AUGUST 

2020, at 6 (2020), https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/acs/pdf/data-analysis/flashReports/2020/ 

08.pdf [https://perma.cc/3XZR-JT4T] (comparing May 2019 and May 2020); JULY 2020 FLASH 

REPORT, supra note 18, at 6 (comparing April 2019 and April 2020). 
66 JULY 2020 FLASH REPORT, supra note 18, at 6. 
67 See, e.g., Mical Raz, Unintended Consequences of Expanded Mandatory Reporting 

Laws, 139 PEDIATRICS PERSPS. 1 (2017); Jane Spinak, Child Welfare and COVID-19: An 

Unexpected Opportunity for Systemic Change, in LAW IN THE TIME OF COVID-19 74 

(Katherina Pistor ed., 2020). 
68 JULY 2020 FLASH REPORT, supra note 18, at 32–33. 



2022] AN UNINTENDED ABOLITION 15 

stemmed from ACS investigations, while less than 4% stemmed from self-

referrals.69 Families, who have never been accustomed to turning to ACS 

for truly voluntary services (as the self-referral numbers indicate),70 

continued to find support elsewhere, as discussed in Part III. 

2. Decrease in Family Separations 

As the stream of reports and investigations slowed, so too did the 

number of new filings in family court and the number of families separated 

by the government. In the first three full months following the City’s 

shutdown, the number of new neglect and abuse cases filed by ACS in court 

fell by more than fifty percent, to 1,482, from 3,205.71 This decrease flowed 

from the decrease in investigations and from the Court Directive that 

limited ACS to filing new cases only where it sought to separate families.72  

It is not surprising that ACS filed fewer cases overall. After all, the 

Court Directive forbade ACS from filing any cases where it sought only 

court-ordered supervision over intact families, a type of case that 

previously made up more than half of all filings.73 More surprising is the 

equally dramatic drop in the number of children placed in foster care. 

Conceivably, the number of children placed in foster care could have stayed 

nearly steady, if ACS had ceased filing court-ordered supervision cases and 

continued to exercise its power to request removals in the same manner 

that it had pre-pandemic. Instead, compared with the same period the year 

prior, only half as many children were placed in foster care as a result of 

ACS’s applications for a removal at the time of filing: 375 children in spring 

2020, down from 700 in that period in 2019.74  

This dramatic drop suggests that during the shutdown, two 

institutional actors—ACS itself and family court judges—began paying 

greater heed to New York’s legal standard for removal of children from 

their parents. Under that standard, articulated by the New York Court of 

Appeals in Nicholson v. Scoppetta,75 ACS must show that a child would be 

placed at imminent risk of physical or emotional harm if they stayed in 

their parents’ care and that no orders short of removal could mitigate that 

harm.76 Moreover, in recognition of the trauma that even a brief family 

separation exacts on any child, ACS must show that the risk associated 

 
69 JULY 2020 FLASH REPORT, supra note 18, at 33. 
70 See A Parent’s Guide to a Child Abuse Investigation, supra note 30 (discussing 

lack of parental trust in ACS). 
71 Compare JULY 2019 FLASH REPORT, supra note 18, at 8 (reporting new filings for 

April, May, and June 2020), with JULY 2020 FLASH REPORT, supra note 18, at 9 (reporting 

new filings for same months in 2019). 
72 See Mar. 23, 2020 Family Court Coronavirus Plan, supra note 46. Note that ACS 

classifies cases as “Court Ordered Supervision”; “Remand” (kinship or non-kinship foster 

placement); or “Other/Unspecified.” See, e.g., JULY 2019 FLASH REPORT, supra note 18, at 8. 

The “Court Ordered Supervision” category includes: 1) cases where children stay home with 

their parents under court-ordered ACS monitoring; 2) cases where children are released 

home to one parent under court-ordered ACS monitoring but the other parent is excluded 

from the home; and 3) cases where children are released to a non-parent friend or relative 

as an alternative to formal foster care. 
73 See supra notes 53–54 and accompanying text.  
74 Compare JULY 2019 FLASH REPORT, supra note 18, at 9, with JULY 2020 FLASH 

REPORT, supra note 18, at 9. This refers only to “remand” applications. See supra note 72.  
75 820 N.E.2d 840 (N.Y. 2004). 
76 Nicholson, 820 N.E. 2d at 850–52. 



16 COLUM. J. RACE & L. F. [Vol. 12:1 

with the child remaining in their parents’ care outweighs the harm to them 

caused by a removal from their care.77 

With the Court Directive forbidding the filing of monitoring-only 

cases, ACS should have filed only those cases that it determined met the 

Nicholson standard for removal. Indeed, the steep decrease in the number 

of children placed in foster care demonstrates that ACS did in fact request 

far fewer family separations during the shutdown.78 In a time where 

families were under increasing pressure, ACS requested remands in 

approximately half as many cases.79 This decrease outpaced the decrease 

in reports received,80 showing that the drop in requests for remands cannot 

be attributed solely to a “pipeline problem” from a lack of reports. Instead, 

in addition to holding off on filing monitoring-only cases, ACS seems to 

have begun assessing rigorously the cases in which it might seek a removal 

and declining to file some cases where it typically would have sought a 

removal.81 This gives credence to an argument long made by parents and 

their advocates: that in normal times, ACS does not limit itself to seeking 

removals only in cases that meet the Nicholson standard and that it 

instead seeks removals even where there is no imminent risk or where 

alternate services could be put in place, out of a sense of frustration with 

“uncooperative” parents or in an attempt to punish them.82 

During the shutdown, even among the smaller set of cases where 

ACS did seek a removal in court, judges, too, appeared to apply Nicholson 

 
77 Id.; see also, e.g., William Wan, What Separation from Parents Does to Children: 

‘The Effect is Catastrophic’, WASH. POST (June 18, 2018), https://www.washingtonpost.com 

/national/health-science/what-separation-from-parents-does-to-children-the-effect-is-

catastrophic/2018/06/18/c00c30ec-732c-11e8-805c-4b67019fcfe4_story.html [https://perma.cc 

/YJW4-EW3U] (summarizing research showing that separations stunt the neurological 

development of young children); Vivek Sankaran, Easy Come, Easy Go: The Plight of 

Children Who Spend Less Than 30 Days in Foster Care, 19 U. PA. J. L. & SOC. CHANGE 207, 

207–37 (2016) (reviewing studies showing that even short-term removals harm children 

emotionally, developmentally, and socially).  
78 The number of children placed in foster care serves as a proxy for the number of 

family separations requested by ACS, as family court judges grant the vast majority of ACS’s 

applications for removal. See supra note 54 and accompanying text (concluding that courts 

approve seventy-five to eighty percent of removal applications). 
79 Compare supra note 56 and accompanying text (describing drop in reports) with 

supra note 71 and accompanying text (describing drop in foster care placements). 
80 Compare supra note 56 and accompanying text (describing drop in reports) with 

supra note 71 and accompanying text (describing drop in foster care placements). 
81 ACS’s decision to exercise its discretion more judiciously in this arena is of a piece 

with its actions in other arenas during the shutdown. For instance, during the shutdown, 

ACS and foster care providers began to “proactively review[] the cases of 4,000 children and 

work[] with parents’ and children’s attorneys to determine if cases could move forward with 

increased and/or unsupervised visiting, pre-disposition release, trial discharge or final 

discharge” and “found these proactive reviews to be beneficial in expediting the reunification 

process.” The Child Welfare System During COVID-19: Oversight Hearing Before the Comm. 

on the General Welfare, N.Y. City Council 14 (June 14, 2021) (written testimony of David 

Hansell, Comm’r of the Admin. for Child. Servs.), https://www1.nyc.gov/ 

assets/acs/pdf/testimony/2021/ChildWelfareSystem.pdf [https://perma.cc/K47H-TG5X]. ACS 

had always had the power to conduct such “proactive” reviews and speed families’ 

reunifications; it just had not exercised it. 
82 See supra note 55 and accompanying text; see also Stephanie Clifford & Jessica 

Silver-Greenberg, Foster Care as Punishment: The New Reality of ‘Jane Crow’, N.Y. TIMES 

(July 21, 2017), https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/21/nyregion/foster-care-nyc-jane-crow. 

html [https://perma.cc/4TCA-ZJLS]. 



2022] AN UNINTENDED ABOLITION 17 

more rigorously, paying special attention to the harm of a removal. 

Whereas judges previously denied twenty to twenty-five percent of ACS 

requests to separate families, in the two weeks immediately following the 

transition to virtual court, judges denied approximately thirty percent.83 In 

those cases where parents immediately challenged their children’s 

removal, judges determined that children should remain with their 

families in slightly more than fifty percent of cases.84  

Tasked with determining whether to separate families in the 

middle of an unprecedented global public health crisis, judges displayed 

more skepticism of ACS’s applications. Public defenders who litigated 

hearings contesting removals during the initial shutdown reported that 

judges increasingly fixated on the harm of removal to the child, as the 

pandemic disrupted families’ visits.85 Whereas judges typically expect that 

children in foster care will have at least two visits each week with their 

parents, that expectation was suddenly disrupted.86 A remand order might 

now mean that a child would not see their parents in person for months. 

Per observers in court, this uncertainty caused some judges, at least, to 

weigh the harm of removal more heavily in their analysis and thus grant 

fewer applications for removals. 87 

Judges’ increased reluctance to separate families is especially 

striking considering the context of the applications they were hearing. With 

ACS itself appearing to exercise greater discretion and screening cases 

more rigorously before requesting separations, the cases that were in fact 

filed should have represented the direst situations—cases where ACS was 

confident that a court would agree that the children would be at risk at 

home, where services could not mitigate the risk, and where the harm of 

removal, even compounded by the lack of meaningful family visitation, did 

not outweigh the risk of the child staying home. It would follow that judges 

would grant a higher rate of applications in this context, given ACS’s own 

intensified screening. But instead, judges disagreed with ACS with greater 

frequency, leaving more families together. 

For more than a decade, ACS officials have pointed to the city’s 

falling foster care population and insisted that they view the removal of 

children from their families as a “last resort,” a path taken only when 

 
83 Compare Abigail Kramer, Child Welfare Limbo: Covid-19 Puts Family 

Reunifications On ‘Indefinite’ Hold, THE NEW SCH. CTR. FOR N.Y.C. AFFS. (Mar. 30, 2020), 

http://www.centernyc.org/reports-briefs/2020/3/30/child-welfare-limbo-covid-19-puts-family-

reunifications-on-indefinite-hold [https://perma.cc/B32L-HM4Q] (discussing outcomes of 

applications for removals in 2020), with supra note 54 and accompanying text (discussing 

same for 2019).  
84 Kramer, supra note 83; Fitzgerald, supra note 54. 
85 Olumhense, supra note 50; Interview with Parent Att’y B, supra note 48; 

Interview with Parent Att’y C, supra note 48. Even when judges did enter orders removing 

children from their parents’ care, parent defense attorneys reported that judges were more 

inclined to grant liberal visitation to parents, allowing visits outside the offices of ACS or 

foster care agencies, in order to ensure visits could actually take place in this period. 

Interview with Attorney D, Parent Defense Attorney, N.Y.C. Public Defender Office (Feb. 24, 

2021) (on file with author). 
86 Olumhense, supra note 50; Interview with Parent Att’y B, supra note 48; 

Interview with Parent Att’y C, supra note 48. 
87 Interview with Parent Att’y B, supra note 48; Interview with Parent Att’y C, 

supra note 48. 



18 COLUM. J. RACE & L. F. [Vol. 12:1 

absolutely necessary to protect children from serious harm.88 If this were 

the case, the extreme reduction in removals during the shutdown would 

mean that by placing only half as many children in foster care, ACS and 

family court judges left hundreds of New York City children to suffer grave 

harm at home with unsafe caregivers. But as Part I.C shows, the children 

who stayed home in this period remained safe with their families and 

within their communities. This precipitous drop in removals, and the 

absence of any negative consequences for child safety, suggests that in 

normal times, ACS needlessly requests—and courts needlessly approve—

hundreds of foster care placements where families never needed that 

intervention after all. 

C. Sustained Safety 

The pandemic brought a torrent of sensationalist news articles, 

positing that children were at increased risk from their families during 

stay-at-home orders.89 These articles, backed by horrifying anecdotes 

rather than data, were wrong. Through the initial Pause period, severe 

child abuse in New York City fell, and there was no compensatory increase 

in reports as the city began re-opening and as mandated reporters and 

caseworkers resumed their surveillance. Per ACS’s own data, even as only 

half as many children were taken from their families, children stayed just 

as safe. 

1. Fall in Child Abuse 

Measured by reports of child fatalities and physical or sexual abuse, 

child abuse dropped during the shutdown. While such reports always make 

up a tiny sliver of child maltreatment concerns, they offer a valuable and 

much-cited measure.90 All mandated reporters are affected by implicit 

biases, but child injuries and fatalities serve as a more objective measure 

than nebulous suspicions of neglect.91 Further, concerns that rise to the 

level of injury or death to a child are more likely to result in medical 

 
88 See, e.g., Racial Disparities in the Child Welfare System: Oversight Hearing Before 

the Comm. on the General Welfare, N.Y. City Council 16 (Oct. 31, 2019) (written testimony of 

David Hansell, Comm’r of the Admin. for Child. Servs.), https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/acs/ 

pdf/testimony/2020/GWCommitteeHearing.pdf [https://perma.cc/9VJF-8WBC] (describing 

foster care as a “necessary but last resort”); N.Y.C. ADMIN. FOR CHILD. SERVS., FOSTER CARE 

STRATEGIC BLUEPRINT: THREE-YEAR PROGRESS REPORT 7 (2020), https://www1.nyc.gov/ 

assets/acs/pdf/data-analysis/2020/FosterCareBluePrintFY2020.pdf [https://perma.cc/M3EL-

TBKH] (highlighting the drop in the number of children in foster care). 
89 See, e.g., Nikita Stewart, Child Abuse Cases Drop 51 Percent. The Authorities Are 

Very Worried., N.Y. TIMES (Aug. 7, 2020), https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/09/nyregion/ 

coronavirus-nyc-child-abuse.html [https://perma.cc/L4D3-36RS]; Candy Woodall, As 

Hospitals See More Severe Child Abuse Injuries During Coronavirus, ‘The Worst Is Yet To 

Come’, USA TODAY (May 13, 2020), https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/05/ 

13/hospitals-seeing-more-severe-child-abuse-injuries-during-coronavirus/3116395001/ 

[https://perma.cc/Y87U-8C4L]. 
90 Cf. Martin Guggenheim, The History and Influence of the National Association of 

Counsel for Children – An Alternate Perspective, 39 CHILD. LEGAL RTS. J. 12, 14 (2020) 

(describing the emergence of “battered child syndrome”—findings by medical professionals 

that explained injuries to children as consequences of child abuse—as driving the creation of 

the modern family regulation system); Lois A. Weithorn, Protecting Children from Exposure 

to Domestic Violence: The Use and Abuse of Child Maltreatment Statutes, 53 HASTINGS L. J. 

1, 55–60 (2001) (tracing same history). 
91 See supra notes 18–19 (discussing coding of poverty as neglect); see also supra 

note 26 (discussing bias among mandated reporters). 



2022] AN UNINTENDED ABOLITION 19 

attention and less likely to evade the purview of a mandated reporter, even 

during a shutdown.92  

In spring 2019, the SCR received nearly 5,000 reports of physical 

abuse, a category including “burn, fatality, fracture, choking, twisting, 

shaking, excessive corporal punishment, internal injuries, lacerations, 

bruises, welts, poisoning, noxious substances.”93 In that period, 70% of 

reports alleging any form of abuse were unfounded, i.e. not supported by 

any credible evidence.94 In the same months of 2020, during the Pause, the 

SCR received approximately 2,000 reports of physical abuse, a decrease of 

60%.95 Just over 75% of reports alleging any form of abuse were 

unfounded.96 

This dramatic decrease in reports may reflect that some incidents 

of physical injuries to children went unnoticed and unreported once 

children were confined to their homes. However, the number of 

investigations related to child fatalities—the type of tragedy least likely to 

avoid public review, irrespective of stay-at-home orders—also dropped by 

25% between February 2019 and June 2019 and the same period in 2020.97 

Further, the commissioner of ACS reported that there had not been any 

significant changes in emergency room usage, one possible indicator of 

unreported incidents of child abuse.98 More broadly, he testified that there 

had not been any indicators of “a larger bolus of undetected charges” of 

child abuse.99 

Taken together, this data indicates that child abuse did not 

increase during the COVID-19 Pause. Fewer reports were received, and 

among the reports that were received, fewer were substantiated, even as 

workers had more time to devote to each individual investigation. 

 
92 Reports by medical professionals and law enforcement—the mandatory reporters 

often best positioned to report physical abuse—fell by only 40%, compared to the 77% drop 

in educators’ reports. JULY 2020 FLASH REPORT, supra note 18, at 28.  
93 JULY 2019 FLASH REPORT, supra note 18, at 27; JULY 2020 FLASH REPORT, supra 

note 18, at 29. 
94 N.Y.C. ADMIN. FOR CHILD. SERVS., CHILD WELFARE INDICATORS QUARTERLY 

REPORT 2ND QUARTER 2019 (APR–JUN 2019) 5–6 (2019), https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/acs/ 

pdf/dataanalysis/2020/CWIndicatorsCityCouncilReportQ22019.pdf [https://perma.cc/5WT4-

CJKY]. 
95 JULY 2020 FLASH REPORT, supra note 18, at 29. 
96 N.Y.C. ADMIN. FOR CHILD. SERVS., CHILD WELFARE INDICATORS QUARTERLY 

REPORT 2ND QUARTER 2020 (APR–JUN 2020) 6–7 (2020), https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/acs/ 

pdf/dataanalysis/2020/ChildWelfareIndicatorsReportQ2.pdf [https://perma.cc/4MVL-R5D7]. 
97 N.Y.C Admin. for Child. Servs., Response to Author’s Freedom of Information 

Law Request (Aug. 20, 2020) (on file with author) (reporting that from February 2019 to 

June 2019, there were sixty-three “[c]hildren with fatality SCR allegations (unique 

children),” including “children with roles in initial and subsequent investigation stages,” 

compared to forty-seven children in the same period in 2020; these numbers reflect the total 

number of reports received regarding child fatalities and include fatalities later determined 

not to be the result of parental neglect or abuse). 
98 The Child Welfare System During COVID-19: Oversight Hearing Before the 

Comm. on the General Welfare, N.Y. City Council 51:00 (June 14, 2021) (testimony of David 

Hansell, Comm’r of the Admin. for Child. Servs.), https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/ 

View.ashx?M=F&ID=9578156&GUID=AB24EBFD-8C7D-4A08-9186-923C749CD85B 

[https://perma.cc/B4LV-TLRY] [hereinafter Hansell Testimony]. 
99 Id.  



20 COLUM. J. RACE & L. F. [Vol. 12:1 

Measured by incidences of physical abuse, the shutdown coincided with 

decreased child maltreatment. 

2. Absence of a Rebound Effect 

In fall 2020, in a respite between waves of COVID-19, New York 

City crawled back toward normalcy: children began returning to schools, 

workers began returning to the field, and family court operations began 

normalizing.100 While the number of reports and investigations began to 

rise again, there was not any rebound effect, i.e. any increase in reports or 

investigations to compensate for a sustained period of underreporting, by 

any of three measures. 

First, even as mandated reporters returned to the field, the total 

number of reports remained lower than the previous year. In the final three 

months of 2020, the SCR received 17% fewer reports than it had received 

in the year prior.101 By the time the city’s schools completed their staged 

re-opening for in-person education on September 30, 2020, a quarter of the 

city’s schoolchildren were attending class in person.102 Following school re-

openings, SCR reports did creep upward but at a rate in line with the 

typical increase in a non-pandemic fall, rather than a more dramatic 

leap.103 Far from showing a rebound effect from schools calling in a backlog 

of reports, school personnel still made 35% fewer reports than they had 

during the same period the previous year.104  

Second, the types of concerns reported did not shift from the year 

prior. In both 2019 and 2020, approximately 75% of reports received in the 

 
100 N.Y.C. Fam. Ct., COVID-19 Phase 4 Operations Summary (July 31, 2020) (on 

file with author); Eliza Shapiro & Mihir Zaveri, New York City Becomes First Big City in 

U.S. to Reopen All Its Schools, N.Y. TIMES (Nov. 18, 2020), https://www.nytimes.com/2020/ 

10/01/nyregion/nyc-coronavirus-schools-reopen.html [https://perma.cc/8QXD-KQUR]. 
101 N.Y.C. ADMIN. FOR CHILD. SERVS., FLASH MONTHLY INDICATOR REPORT: 

JANUARY 2021, at 28 (2021), https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/acs/pdf/data-analysis/flash 

Reports/2021/01.pdf [https://perma.cc/4U9C-M6UQ]. 
102 Eliza Shapiro, Only 26% of N.Y.C. Students Attend In-Person Classes, Far From 

Goal, N.Y. TIMES (Oct. 26, 2020), https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/26/nyregion/nyc-schools-

attendance.html [https://perma.cc/Q3RN-69M4]. 
103 Compare a 20% increase in reports between September 2020 and December 

2020, N.Y.C. ADMIN. FOR CHILD. SERVS., FLASH MONTHLY INDICATOR REPORT: OCTOBER 

2020, at 3 (2020), https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/acs/pdf/data-analysis/flashReports/ 

2020/10.pdf [https://perma.cc/FA3A-F4F3]; N.Y.C. ADMIN. FOR CHILD. SERVS., FLASH 

MONTHLY INDICATOR REPORT: DECEMBER 2020, at 3 (2020), https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/ 

acs/pdf/data-analysis/flashReports/2020/12.pdf [https://perma.cc/MT82-YNLE] [hereinafter 

DEC. 2020 FLASH REPORT], with a 15% increase in reports between September 2019 and 

November 2019, N.Y.C. ADMIN. FOR CHILD. SERVS., FLASH MONTHLY INDICATOR REPORT: 

OCTOBER 2019, at 3 (2019), https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/acs/pdf/data-analysis/flash 

Reports/2019/10.pdf [https://perma.cc/2ETE-F3SD]; N.Y.C. ADMIN. FOR CHILD. SERVS., 

FLASH MONTHLY INDICATOR REPORT: DECEMBER 2019, at 3 (2019), https://www1.nyc.gov/ 

assets/acs/pdf/data-analysis/flashReports/2019/12.pdf [https://perma.cc/MB7V-KYAR], and 

a 27% increase in reports between September 2018 and December 2018. N.Y.C. ADMIN. FOR 

CHILD. SERVS., FLASH MONTHLY INDICATOR REPORT: OCTOBER 2018, at 3 (2018), 

https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/acs/pdf/data-analysis/flashReports/2018/10.pdf [https://perma. 

cc/MU4P-YQZJ]; N.Y.C. ADMIN. FOR CHILD. SERVS., FLASH MONTHLY INDICATOR REPORT: 

DECEMBER 2018, at 3 (2018), https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/acs/pdf/data-analysis/flash 

Reports/2018/12.pdf [https://perma.cc/RW7M-VH9E]. 
104 DEC. 2020 FLASH REPORT, supra note 103, at 28. 



2022] AN UNINTENDED ABOLITION 21 

city solely relayed concerns of neglect.105 While reflective of the ongoing 

issue of families being reported for poverty, this is consistent with prior 

patterns. The Pause did not, as doomsayers predicted, lead to an increase 

in physical abuse of children by overstressed parents.  

Finally, the rate of substantiation of reports also remained steady 

through the fall. Through 2019 and 2020, the rate of substantiation 

hovered between 35% and 37%.106 Had mandated reporters returned to 

their surveillance positions and reported an influx of valid concerns from a 

backlog that had previously gone unreported, the rate of substantiation 

would have been higher. But that was not the case. This is in line with 

prior findings. Every summer, when schools go on break, the number of 

reports to family regulation hotlines drops, but “teacher reports that do 

result in substantiation remain steady.”107 Put differently, the reports that 

teachers do not make over summer months but that they might make 

during the school year are unlikely to constitute child maltreatment even 

if investigated.108 

Indeed, the commissioner of ACS cited the steady rate of 

substantiation as yet another sign that cases of child neglect or abuse had 

not gone underreported during the shutdown.109 ACS’s data from the fall 

reveals that children stayed as safe with less surveillance, less government 

intrusion, and less family separation. They stayed safe not because of the 

family regulation system’s presence but, rather, in its absence. This can be 

attributed in part to the radical re-imagining of society that was taking 

place at the same time, described in Part II. 

III. SUPPORTING FAMILIES WITHOUT REGULATING 

FAMILIES 

Abolition requires that we look back and reckon with the racist 

history of systems like the family regulation system and that we 

acknowledge the ongoing purposes of such systems in the present. But by 

the same token, it demands that we look forward to imagine and build a 

more humane and democratic society, one no longer reliant on those 

systems to meet human needs and solve social problems.110  

In the initial shutdown period, thousands of New Yorkers engaged 

in just such a transformative project. Even before the pandemic, the 

government failed to meet New Yorkers’ material needs, and the sudden 

shuttering of schools, workplaces, and government offices only amplified 

 
105 Compare N.Y.C. ADMIN. FOR CHILD. SERVS., CHILD WELFARE INDICATORS 

ANNUAL REPORT 2020, at 9 (2020), https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/acs/pdf/data-analysis/2020/ 

CityCouncilReportCY2020.pdf [https://perma.cc/5AQM-2TGS], with N.Y.C. ADMIN. FOR 

CHILD. SERVS., CHILD WELFARE INDICATORS ANNUAL REPORT 2019, at 9 (2019), 

https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/acs/pdf/child_welfare/2020/CWIndicatorsAnnualCityCouncilRe

portCY2019.pdf [https://perma.cc/88WL-HY9H]. 
106 MAR. 2020 FLASH REPORT, supra, note 24, at 6; N.Y.C. ADMIN. FOR CHILD. 

SERVS., FLASH MONTHLY INDICATOR REPORT: MARCH 2021, at 6 (2021), 

https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/acs/pdf/data-analysis/flashReports/2021/03.pdf 

[https://perma.cc/S5LP-M74J]. 
107 WEINER, supra note 25, at 2. 
108 Id. 
109 Hansell Testimony, supra note 98, at 51:00.  
110 See Roberts, Abolition Constitutionalism, supra note 3, at 7–8.  



22 COLUM. J. RACE & L. F. [Vol. 12:1 

problems ranging from food insecurity, to housing instability, to lack of 

access to childcare and physical and mental health care.111 Against this 

backdrop, mutual aid networks—built on models of solidarity, collective 

action, and transformative change, rather than charity, saviorism, and 

control—grew in every borough. Meanwhile, more New Yorkers received 

financial assistance from the government, with fewer strings attached, 

itself a re-envisioning of the role of government.  

This Part describes the massive growth and work of mutual aid 

groups during the Pause, including the tensions raised by these projects, 

and then concludes by briefly describing the role of government 

entitlements. 

A. Mobilization of Mutual Aid 

Dean Spade, an organizer and legal scholar, describes mutual aid 

as “collective coordination to meet each other’s needs,” growing out of “an 

awareness that the systems we have in place are not going to meet 

them.”112 In fact, Spade writes, those very systems “have often created the 

crisis or are making things worse.”113 Mutual aid projects meet people’s 

immediate survival needs. Beyond that, they build a shared understanding 

of the structural causes of deprivation and mobilize movements to 

dismantle the systems causing the harm.114 These projects stand in stark 

contrast to charity and government social services, programs that position 

rich people in and out of government as morally superior to poor people and 

empower the former to judge the moral worth of charity recipients and 

attach conditions to aid accordingly.115 Rather than aiming to root out the 

violence of the capitalist system, charity and social services legitimize that 

very system, providing political cover to elites while controlling and 

surveilling recipients and affording minimal assistance.116  

When, in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, existing charity and 

government systems failed to meet the basic needs of New Yorkers, mutual 

aid projects stepped into the breach, just as they have in the face of 

countless past disasters worldwide.117  

During the shutdown, New Yorkers’ needs swelled; by mid-April 

2020, one in four New Yorkers was food insecure, and nearly forty percent 

of parents reported skipping or cutting meals for themselves to ensure they 

 
111 Michael Karpman, Dulce Gonzalez & Genevieve M. Kenney, Parents Are 

Struggling to Provide for Their Families during the Pandemic, URBAN INST., 

https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/102254/parents-are-struggling-to-

provide-for-their-families-during-the-pandemic_1.pdf [https://perma.cc/VPM4-4KLN]. 
112 DEAN SPADE, MUTUAL AID: BUILDING SOLIDARITY DURING THIS CRISIS (AND THE 

NEXT) 9, 12 (2020).  
113 Id. 
114 Id. at 9, 13. 
115 Id. at 22. 
116 Id. at 24. 
117 See, e.g., Lucas Blaise Burdick, After the Flood: Lessons from Occupy Sandy, 

WORLD AT 1°C (Sept. 13, 2017), https://worldat1c.org/after-the-flood-lessons-from-occupy-

sandy-904c81a21c2f [https://perma.cc/TKU2-YRCY]; Isa Rodríguez Soto, Mutual Aid and 

Survival as Resistance in Puerto Rico, 52 NACLA REP. AMERICAS 303 (2020); SPADE, supra 

note 113, at 3–5 (describing mutual aid projects efforts in Hong Kong). 



2022] AN UNINTENDED ABOLITION 23 

had food for their children.118 Parents could not work, not only because 

their workplaces were closed but because in the absence of schools, they 

lacked childcare.119 As stressors piled up, families were even less likely to 

have access to mental health services.120 The family regulation system, like 

so many arms of the government, failed to meet New Yorkers’ needs. 

Indeed, though preventive services had been touted as a way to help poor 

families in need of support, the pandemic laid bare the entrenchment of 

these services within the larger model of family policing. As the number of 

reports and investigations plummeted, so too did the provision of 

preventive services, even as families’ needs for material support grew.121  

With the government failing them, New Yorkers themselves 

undertook the project of ensuring that all community members’ needs were 

met. By the end of July, there were nearly sixty mutual aid networks 

operating throughout the city.122 Some of these groups organized through 

social media after the city shut down.123 But others grew out of pre-existing 

projects; for instance, a group in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood that 

previously fought for police accountability and against gentrification 

turned its attention to food distribution.124 Regardless of their histories, 

projects espoused principles of solidarity, collective care, accountability, 

and racial justice.125  

Mutual aid projects mobilized to provide an extraordinary array of 

services to community members who requested aid. Nearly every group 

organized grocery deliveries and provision of essential items like diapers, 

but some focused on more specialized services, like childcare for workers or 

mental health care and support groups.126 Rather than recreating the 

 
118 Sharon Lerner, “We Need Protein”—Coronavirus Pandemic Deepens New York’s 

Hunger Crisis, INTERCEPT (June 16, 2020), https://theintercept.com/2020/06/16/coronavirus-

hunger-crisis-nyc/ [https://perma.cc/P46Z-8TWZ]. 
119 See, e.g., Eliza Shapiro & Patrick McGeehan, Big New Obstacle for Economic 

Recovery: Child Care Crisis, N.Y. TIMES (July 10, 2020), https://www.nytimes.com/2020/ 

07/10/nyregion/nyc-school-daycare-reopening.html [https://perma.cc/NKM5-ZJ9C]. 
120 Azza Altiraifi & Nicole Rapfogel, Mental Health Care was Severely Inequitable, 

Then Came the Coronavirus Crisis, CTR. AM. PROGRESS (Sept. 10, 2020), 

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/mental-health-care-severely-inequitable-came-

coronavirus-crisis/ [https://perma.cc/N895-AXM7]. 
121 See supra Part I.B. 
122 Elizabeth Lawrence, ‘Love and Solidarity’: Amid Coronavirus, Mutual Aid 

Groups Resurge in New York City, NPR (July 26, 2020), https://www.npr.org/sections/health-

shots/2020/07/26/895115149/love-and-solidarity-amid-coronavirus-mutual-aid-groups-

resurge-in-new-york-city [https://perma.cc/5RTC-D4C2]. 
123 See, e.g., Overview, BED-STUY STRONG’S MUTUAL AID COMMUNITY FUND, 

https://ioby.org/project/bed-stuy-strong%E2%80%99s-mutual-aid-community-fund 

[https://perma.cc/JQ64-FWQ7] (describing group’s mid-March founding through Slack, a 

messaging program). 
124 #BrooklynShowsLove Mutual Aid Project, EQUALITY FOR FLATBUSH, 

https://web.archive.org/web/20211125183319/http://www.equalityforflatbush.org/%20brookl

yn-shows-love-mutual-aid-project/ [https://perma.cc/C892-Z7SZ]. 
125 See, e.g., id.; Mission and Guiding Principles, CROWN HEIGHTS MUTUAL AID, 

https://crownheightsmutualaid.com/mission-and-guiding-principles/ [https://perma.cc/W3 

FL-TJGT]; Lakshmi Gandi, South Asian American Activism Must Go Beyond Viral Stories, 

Advocates Say, NBC NEWS (June 12, 2020), https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/ 

south-asian-american-activism-must-go-beyond-viral-stories-advocates-n1230596 [https:// 

perma.cc/PSJ2-YCYJ] (quoting founder of Bronx Mutual Aid Network). 
126 WORKERS NEED CHILDCARE, https://web.archive.org/web/20200524070452/ 

https://www.workersneedchildcare.org/; About the Network, NYC COVID CARE NETWORK, 



24 COLUM. J. RACE & L. F. [Vol. 12:1 

exacting intake procedures required by charities and government social 

services, groups kept their barriers for entry low, requiring only that 

community members complete online request forms or call intake lines, 

and removing eligibility requirements that judged moral worthiness.127 

While mutual aid was by no means a novel concept in the city, the 

rapid expansion of mutual aid projects was breathtaking. Bed Stuy Strong, 

for instance, began in Brooklyn in March 2020, and had built a network of 

2,700 volunteers by the end of its first month. 128 In neighboring Crown 

Heights, Crown Heights Mutual Aid made 1,300 grocery deliveries between 

March 2020 and May 2020 alone.129 Across the city, mutual aid groups 

pooled and redistributed hundreds of thousands of dollars through the 

work of thousands of volunteers.130 

This rapid growth brought with it some stumbles, particularly for 

newly formed groups. While groups like #BrooklynShowLove in Flatbush 

built on decades of community organizing, newer groups—many populated 

by the same white, affluent people who are displacing poorer Black and 

brown New Yorkers from their homes through gentrification—at times 

displayed the same attitudes of saviorism and the same hierarchical, 

exclusionary decision-making that plague charity and government 

services.131 For instance, controversy erupted in the Crown Heights Mutual 

Aid group, when it unveiled a community fridge at an apartment building 

on the very day that building tenants were memorializing a neighbor who 

had recently been gunned down.132 Residents had not been consulted about 

the placement of the fridge. And they were not comforted by organizers’ 

assurances that the building’s landlord approved of the fridge because 

residents had been engaged in a years-long dispute with that same 

landlord over deplorable housing conditions.133 This tension reflected a 

common reality: mutual aid projects can easily “slip into some of the well-

worn grooves” of the charity model if organizers do not deeply examine 

their principles.134 

 
https://nyccovidcare.org/about [https://perma.cc/GY6X-H8B2]; Rachel Holliday Smith & 

Claudia Irizarry Aponte, Evolving in COVID Crisis, NYC Mutual Aid Groups Head Into 2021 

With Tablets, Toys — and Diapers, THE CITY (Jan. 4, 2021), https://www.thecity.nyc/ 

life/2021/1/4/22202979/nyc-mutual-aid-groups-covid-head-into-2021-with-expanded-mission 

[https://perma.cc/D4DW-N2AD]. 
127 See, e.g., Request a Delivery, INVISIBLE HANDS, https://invisiblehandsdeliver.org/ 

request [https://perma.cc/DJ7M-PXZY]. 
128 Jessica McKenzie, Bed-Stuy Strong: Scaling Mutual Aid During COVID-19, 

CIVIC HALL (Apr. 16, 2020), https://web.archive.org/web/20210710190031/https://civic 

hall.org/civicist/bed-stuy-strong-mutual-aid/. 
129 CMHA Updates: May 21, 2020, CROWN HEIGHTS MUTUAL AID, https://us18. 

campaign-archive.com/?u=4fe6ce4b9bcc1bbfbe2904356&id=551556dda7 [https://perma.cc/ 

75J5-42XM]. 
130 See, e.g., Smith & Aponte, supra note 126; Bed-Stuy Strong’s Mutual Aid 

Community Fund, IOBY, https://ioby.org/project/bed-stuy-strong%E2%80%99s-mutual-aid-

community-fund [https://perma.cc/D4KC-PVLC]. 
131 SPADE, supra note 112, at 45. 
132 Crown Heights Mutual Aid, FACEBOOK (May 12, 2020) (relevant posts on file 

with author). 
133 Id. 
134 SPADE, supra note 112, at 45. 



2022] AN UNINTENDED ABOLITION 25 

These missteps should not be ignored. But nor should they distract 

from the radical project under way. Mutual aid networks undertook the 

project of creating a more democratic and humane society. They rejected 

the dominant model, under which families must “earn” support by proving 

their worthiness and face the loss of their children if they do not adhere to 

outsiders’ visions of what they “should” be doing. Instead, under the mutual 

aid model, community members mobilized to provide support for families—

food, diapers, mental health services, and childcare—premised on the basic 

understanding that all humans deserve support. 

B. Government Support Without Government Control 

Together with the increase in mutual aid came a rare influx of 

government aid with few strings attached. The CARES Act, passed in early 

April 2020, provided a one-time stimulus payment of $1,200 per adult for 

individuals earning less than $75,000 annually, with an additional $500 

payment for each child under the age of seventeen, and an extra $600 per 

week in unemployment benefits, through the end of July 2020.135 Together, 

these measures were projected to transfer $500 billion from the 

government to the people in 2020, more than the total amount of all income 

transfers outside retirement programs in 2019.136 

In some ways, the CARES Act precisely exemplified the aid model 

against which mutual aid stands. It established a hierarchy of 

deservingness, excluding undocumented immigrants and their family 

members; it required that anyone who had not filed taxes the previous year 

jump through additional hoops to claim their stimulus checks; and it served 

to prop up the legitimacy and stability of the capitalist system, by providing 

minimal payments designed to “stimulate” the economy rather than 

enacting broader, longer-lasting changes that would have allowed people 

to meet their needs on an ongoing basis and stay safe for the duration of 

the pandemic.137 

But in other ways, these new entitlements showed the possibility of 

a world in which the government acts to meet people’s survival needs 

without requiring that recipients prove their worthiness, complete 

programs or undergo drug tests, endure stigmatization, or use funds only 

on limited, approved expenses. Empowered to spend their funds as they 

saw fit, people receiving stimulus funds increased their spending on food, 

 
135 Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, Pub. L. No. 116–

136, 134 Stat. 281 (2020). 
136 Zachary Parolin, Megan A. Curran & Christopher Wimer, The CARES Act and 

Poverty in the COVID-19 Crisis, CTR. ON POVERTY & SOCIAL POL’Y (June 21, 2020), 

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5743308460b5e922a25a6dc7/t/5eefa3463153d0544b7f

08b4/1592763209062/Forecasting-Poverty-Estimates-COVID19-CARES-Act-CPSP-2020.pdf 

[https://perma.cc/7H79-BMV6]. 
137 See, e.g., Cyierra Roldan, 1.2 Million New Yorkers Excluded from the CARES 

Act, FISCAL POLICY INST. (May 19, 2020), https://fiscalpolicy.org/1-2-million-new-yorkers-

excluded-from-the-cares-act [https://perma.cc/5ZWP-S3BT]; Stephen Roll & Michal 

Grinstein-Weiss, Did CARES Act Benefits Reach Vulnerable Americans? Evidence From a 

National Survey, BROOKINGS INST. (Aug. 25, 2020), https://www.brookings.edu/research/did-

cares-act-benefits-reach-vulnerable-americans-evidence-from-a-national-survey/ 

[https://perma.cc/MRT8-32CJ] (finding that Black and Hispanic households, part-time 

workers, those without bank accounts, and those with very low income were more likely to 

experience delays in receiving stimulus payments). 



26 COLUM. J. RACE & L. F. [Vol. 12:1 

household items, and bill payments, including rent—that is, survival 

needs.138 With the first stimulus payment, 87% of adults in households 

with incomes of $25,000 or less reported that they used their stimulus 

funds to meet their expenses.139 Among adults who spent their stimulus 

payments, 80% used at least a portion on food, 78% used it on rent, 

mortgage, and/or utilities, and 58% spent it on household supplies and 

personal care products.140 Meanwhile, a much smaller share, 8%, reported 

spending on TVs, electronics, furniture, appliances, or recreational 

items.141 

This usage defies the decades-long narrative that elites need to 

direct the spending of poor people, to protect them, and society, from 

irresponsible, frivolous spending. As people began receiving checks, mutual 

aid projects mobilized, encouraging those who could afford it to turn their 

stimulus checks over to more vulnerable community members, and 

thousands answered the call.142 Meanwhile, the higher unemployment 

payments did not discourage people from re-entering the labor market and 

instead allowed workers to find jobs that suited their expertise and 

skills.143 Overall, rates of poverty fell in the three months following the 

passage of the CARES Act.144  

Like the deconstruction of the family regulation system, this large-

scale government entitlement program proved temporary and 

inadequate.145 But it also proved the possibility of a version of government 

 
138 Scott R. Baker et al., Here’s How Americans Are Spending Their Stimulus 

Checks, KELLOGG INSIGHT (May 5, 2020) https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/ 

stimulus-checks-spending-data-2020-coronavirus-covid [https://perma.cc/542T-8V9X]. 
139 Daniel Perez Lopez & Charles Adam Bee, How Are Americans Using Their 

Stimulus Payments?, U.S. CENSUS BUREAU (June 24, 2020), https://www.census.gov/library/ 

stories/2020/06/how-are-americans-using-their-stimulus-payments.html 

[https://perma.cc/APF7-L8UF]. 
140 Id. 
141 Id. 
142 Christine Chung, Community Groups Ask New Yorkers to Pledge Fed Stimulus 

Checks to Vulnerable, THE CITY (Apr. 14, 2020), https://www.thecity.nyc/economy/2020/ 

4/14/21247102/community-groups-ask-new-yorkers-to-pledge-fed-stimulus-checks-to-

vulnerable [https://perma.cc/48RS-DGBX]; see also #sharemycheck, RESOURCE GENERATION, 

https://web.archive.org/web/20210118014427/https://www.sharemycheck.org/#page. 
143 See generally Lucas Finamor & Dana Scott, Labor Market Trends and 

Unemployment Insurance Generosity During the Pandemic, 199 ECON. LETTERS 5 (2021).  
144 Jeehoon Han, Bruce D. Meyer & James X. Sullivan, Income and Poverty in the 

COVID-19 Pandemic 10–11 (Nat’l Bureau of Econ. Rsch., Working Paper No. 27729, 2020), 

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27729/w27729.pdf [https://perm 

a.cc/YGH7-DRTQ]. 
145 By September 2021, increased federal unemployment benefits had expired, as 

had the national moratorium on evictions. Matthew Haag & Nicole Hong, 800,000 New 

Yorkers Just Lost Federal Unemployment Benefits, N.Y. TIMES (Sept. 7, 2021), 

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/07/nyregion/nyc-federal-unemployment-benefits.html 

[https://perma.cc/5Q49-AASF]; Rachel Siegal, Eviction Moratorium Expires as Renters Face 

Rising Covid Cases and Lack of Aid, WASH. POST (July 31, 2021), https://www.washington 

post.com/business/2021/07/31/eviction-moratorium-expire-cdc/ [https://perma.cc/T8FQ-

BTTK]. Further, half a year had elapsed since the government began issuing the last round 

of stimulus payments. Third Economic Impact Payment, IRS, https://www.irs.gov/corona 

virus/third-economic-impact-payment [https://perma.cc/X2VY-9RZS]. Even as these benefits 

expired, the pandemic raged on; indeed, the expiration of these benefits coincided with the 

surge of the Delta variant of COVID. Apoorva Mandavilli, Benjamin Mueller & Shalini 

Venugopal Bhagat, When Will the Delta Surge End?, N.Y. TIMES (Oct. 1, 2021), 



2022] AN UNINTENDED ABOLITION 27 

too often dismissed as fantasy. Society is accustomed, Spade writes, to a 

binary choice between a government that “denies the disaster’s significance 

and abandons people to its devastation,” or a government that “responds 

with inadequate aid that comes with enhanced policing, surveillance, 

militarization, and wealth transfers to the top.”146 So inured are we to this 

binary that it can feel impossible to imagine any choices beyond it.147 But 

during the shutdown, as woefully inadequate systems that provide aid at 

the cost of human dignity receded, New Yorkers envisioned and enacted a 

radical new society, in which government funds represented freedom 

rather than further oppression and community members collectively 

coordinated to meet their own survival needs and to mobilize for change. 

IV. CONCLUSION 

 As the COVID-19 pandemic has stretched on, it can feel impossible 

to find signs of hope within it. It has killed, as of this writing, nearly 

800,000 Americans, with Black, Native, and Latinx communities 

disproportionately bearing the brunt of those tragic and needless deaths 

even as they are disproportionately called to the frontlines as “essential 

workers.” It has spurred the largest economic crisis since the Great 

Depression, leaving millions of families without sufficient food and on the 

brink of homelessness; and it has kept thousands of children nationwide 

from seeing their parents as they wait out the pandemic in foster care. 

Were that not enough, police have continued to murder Black Americans 

with impunity, those protesting murders by police have themselves been 

beaten and prosecuted, and the former president cheered on police while 

denying the validity of a democratic election and inciting an insurrection.  

But this death and destruction—the rupturing of the interlocking 

systems of oppression that power this country—have, too, created a 

window into a different world, one in which people are not controlled, 

regulated, and destroyed by the government in the service of the capitalist 

system, but instead in which people collectively aid each other to ensure 

not just that community members have what they need to survive but to 

survive safely and to thrive.  

New York’s shutdown forced a temporary but radical reduction of 

the family regulation system, nearly halving the number of reports, 

investigations, and family separations, reducing surveillance of families in 

their schools and in their homes, and removing not only the intrusion but 

also the limited support of voluntary preventive services. Rather than 

endangering children, this shutdown protected them: rates of 

substantiated abuse dipped, rates of substantiated neglect remained 

unchanged, and children stayed sheltered with their families and in their 

communities rather than enduring the trauma of a separation, much less 

a separation with no family visitation. These families stayed safely 

together not because of the family regulation system but because of its 

absence. In the midst of the nonstop trauma of 2020, community members 

worked for and with each other, providing their neighbors food, diapers, 

 
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/01/health/covid-delta-us-britain.html [https://perma.cc/ 

ET8J-KUAP].  
146 SPADE, supra note 112, at 39. 
147 Id. 



28 COLUM. J. RACE & L. F. [Vol. 12:1 

childcare, and mental health services, and redistributing government 

wealth.  

Under the drudgery and daily struggle of the capitalist system, it 

can be difficult to find the space or the energy to imagine, let alone build, a 

more humane and democratic society. The COVID-19 crisis, though, made 

that easier. We need not imagine, from whole cloth, how we might keep 

children safe in the absence of the family regulation system. Nor need we 

continue to speculate as to how we might address the child poverty that 

drives neglect reports without resorting to the violence of family 

separations. We have the answers. We can envision a world in which we 

address child poverty and child safety by providing families the monetary 

support they need, without strings attached, and by building robust 

community support networks, governed by principles of solidarity and 

collective caretaking rather than punishment and moral judgment.  

We can envision this world because, for a short time in 2020, we 

lived it. 


	I.  Introduction
	II.  Putting the Family Regulation System on Pause
	A. New Limits on the Family Regulation System
	1. The Closure of Schools
	2. Guidance to Child Protective Specialists
	3. Guidance to Contracted Agencies
	4. Limitations on the Reach of Family Court

	B. Effect of March Directives
	1. Decrease in Reports and Investigations
	2. Decrease in Family Separations

	C. Sustained Safety
	1. Fall in Child Abuse
	2. Absence of a Rebound Effect


	III.  Supporting Families Without Regulating Families
	A. Mobilization of Mutual Aid
	B. Government Support Without Government Control

	IV.  Conclusion